econner

For what fee?

What can I do now to help?

What's the point of using a blockchain then?

Tether is supposed to be backed 1:1 by US dollars and function as a non-volatile way to move money across exchanges. It's market cap is ~$815M. Lots of people believe that Bitfinex, the creator of Tether, is not actually holding $815M to back it. Instead they believe Bitfinex is creating Tether out of thin air and could be using it to inflate the price of Bitcoin.

It's an exchange so if there's no one to take the other side of the trade then you wouldn't be able to sell. They probably float a little bit of coin, but likely not enough to wipe them out. The question is what they'd do in a crisis. Would they freeze everyone's coin? Would other exchanges do the same?

Now, they could be hacked and lose a lot of customers' coin without realizing it as happened with Mt Gox. This is why it's advisable to hold your coin in an offline wallet, but doing so makes it harder to panic sell. But that shouldn't matter since we're all definitely here just to HODL crypto and see it actually be useful and we're definitely not just to try to speculate off of it. Right?? Right???

Hard to tell. The new tax plan is supposed to get rid of AMT which could be good for exercising options, but it also might get rid of the SALT deduction which would be pretty bad for CA taxpayers. Hard to say for sure.

I suppose it's also about broadening your own horizons so the space of problems that apply to you is a little wider than "mom apps".

Fwiw, it's also a lot easier to hate on every idea than to believe in it :-D. I'm the first to be pessimistic, but I learned that you have to try something & iterate on it even if all you can do is find fault with every idea.

These were also ideas I came up with in like 5 mins. Just showing that ideas are a dime a dozen and it takes exploration to actually find something that works.

The best problems to solve are the ones you experience on a day to day basis, that you are personally invested in. That's what Vincent did here. It's much harder to build for other people because it requires a lot of user research & constant feedback & it's often difficult to even get honest feedback. The trick is recognizing a problem as worthwhile to solve.

Here are a couple of ideas from my day-to-day as a programmer:

- Code review reminder tool. Code reviews are great but there can be social friction to getting them done. I think the typical way this works is to @ mention someone which sends them an email & then ping them on slack if they don't review it w/in a certain amount of time, but I always feel at least a little bad about pinging someone on slack.

- Better software to sync local files to servers for development. A lot of devs run linux machines on aws, develop code locally, and then somehow sync their code from local to the dev server. I feel like people often just write their own scripts that amount to using rsync and some kind of system event watcher for file changes.

- More complex reminders. I want task and date specific reminders. So, for example, remembering to buy someone a gift for their birthday. I want the first reminder 3 weeks before and then a reminder everyday until I resolve.

I dunno if any of these ideas are worth solving though. I don't know if I'd pay for them..but they are things I want.

My impression was that they did this because it made taking a picture faster than using the camera and they specifically did not want to encourage high quality photos. They wanted quick personal moments where you don't care so much how you look or capturing the perfect lighting or whatever.

In April 2011 Roger Ver bought enough bitcoin to drive the price up from $1.89 to $3.30. His company was the first to accept Bitcoin for payment. He paid for the first radio and billboard advertisements for Bitcoin. He funded BitInstant, Blockchain.info, BitPay, Ripple, and Kraken. He helped found the Bitcoin foundation. He started an online store that accepted only bitcoin. He essentially became a spokesman for Bitcoin.

Ok, "most" was the wrong word, but Roger Ver and Gavin Andresen were instrumental in the success of Bitcoin and they now support BCH.

Yes, there's really nothing that gives Bitcoin value beyond new investors being willing to pay more for it than previous investors. Most people don't transact using it and the network is far too slow to support that use case anyway. It is a "store of value" that loses or gains half its value every few months. The community is torn with 3 separate forks & some of the earliest Bitcoiners have gone all in on Bitcoin Cash. The majority of the hashing power is controlled by a few entities and is a far cry from the decentralization originally envisioned. The communities online no longer talk about Bitcoin as a useful tool. They just talk about getting rich off of it. coinmarketcap.com, a site only for checking the price of cryptocurrencies, is a top 500 site globally according to Alexa, meaning there are a lot of people checking the price of bitcoin, few people using it for anything.

If you're doing short term cap gains then you have to report as regular income. If you have over $526,443 in taxable income in California then your total income tax rate is actually 51.9% (39.6% federal, 12.3% state).

No, but maybe we can guess?

Uber had 170 employees in Jan 2013 and were valued at $3.5 billion in Aug 2013. Their goal was to 4x the number of employees by end of 2013. They then had 1500 employees in Oct 2014 at a valuation of around $17 billion.

Let's say equity grants ranged in value from $50,000 to $200,000 (these are probably good 25th and 75th percentiles) in stock options.

The secondary is at $48 billion, which is an increase of 14x over the 2013 valuation and 3x over the 2014 valuation. Assume Uber had 600 employees at the time of the $3.5bn valuation.

The 2013 equity grants are now worth $700,000 to $2,800,000 (conservatively).

So I'd say 600-700 millionaires from that alone. Probably a whole bunch more if you count later larger grants times the smaller multiples.

So maybe 1000 millionaires?

Also, employees are only able to sell 50% of vested I believe in this round and will have to pay tax up to 40%. So that reduces the number a bit.

The problem though is that if you have ISOs they usually have to be exercised within 90 days of departure from a company.

Some companies are extending that deadline to 7 years, but the IRS disqualifies ISOs 90 days after departure so they have to convert to NSOs.

So this would prevent companies from providing an option extension.

The secondary markets have Uber shares at an ~$50 billion valuation. So that speaks somewhat to what the lower valuation is going to be for the tender offer.

Why was this flagged?

Thanks for the overview. Very helpful to someone w/ no previous knowledge.

Why did the majority of developers not want to raise the block size? / How exactly does it make nodes much more expensive to operate?

The first point could be likened to the Apple vs. Google design model.

Google: "Test 36 shades of blue and choose the one that performs best"

Apple: "Create beautiful product based on user experience and then convince you that you like it."

I don't think making all product decisions based on data is necessarily good, nor is designing in a vacuum.

I can't imagine that no one uses the app if it was just acquired for a billion dollars. It's possible your experience is not representative.

I dunno there's something to be said about becoming a real company with reporting deadlines instead of living perpetually in private valuation fantasy land.

But hopefully you struck gold. Or you just stay in SF I guess.

Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics William Dunham

Why is this title in quotes?

I don't really understand their tech yet but I believe Lightning is working on a solution to this problem: https://lightning.network/

Wow, yea, doesn't seem like a good idea:

A final thing about SPACs is that they are so expensive. Banks charge a rack rate of about 7 percent for initial public offerings, though big sexy tech IPOs tend to be done more cheaply. SPAC sponsors compensate themselves rather more lavishly. Hedosophia's sponsor -- a Cayman Islands company owned by Palihapitiya and his co-founder -- invested $25,000 to found the SPAC. In exchange for that nominal payment, and their work on finding a company to take public, they get 20 percent of the SPAC's stock. (They are also are putting in another $12 million or so to buy warrants in connection with its IPO.) A 20 percent fee for taking a company public is just ... more ... than a 7 percent fee. And that's not even counting the 5.5 percent fee that Credit Suisse charged for taking Hedosophia public! Something like a quarter of every dollar that investors are putting into Hedosophia is going to compensate financiers for doing the work of (ultimately) taking a unicorn public, which is a funny way to make that process more efficient.

How does this point invalidate their issue? All you've done is brought up another problem. Now there are 2 problems.

Bloomberg is saying China plans to ban trading of bitcoin on all domestic exchanges.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-14/bitcoin-t...

I doubt things have changed that much. Certain individuals are more visible now, but I'm sure there are still plenty of people who are not obsessed with these things.

Just curious, how do you find freelance work? And how much time do you spend garnering clients beyond that 20 hours?